United States

The United States is a federal republic located in North America. Its capital is Washington D.C., which is a federal district among 50 states. It is the most ethnically-diverse and multicultural country on Earth, as it was founded as a land of immigrants. The geography and climate are also diverse, with grassy plains in the center of the country, desert in the West, forests in the north, and swamps and bayous in the south.

Founding
The United States was founded on 4 July 1776 when 56 delegates from the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain signed the Declaration of Independence, an article that was written by Thomas Jefferson and reviewed by a few other members of the Continental Congress (such as Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin). The Americans signed the declaration after the British king George III of Great Britain rejected the Olive Branch Petition, an article that asked the king to consider returning life to the way it was before the start of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Led by President of Congress John Hancock, the United States gained full independence in 1783 after the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Revolution. America gained independence with assistance from the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Spain, and the United Provinces, who joined the war against the British in 1778, 1779, and 1780, respectively, and from the Kingdom of Morocco, the first to recognize their independence in 1777. The new American nation was finalized with the signing of the US Constitution in 1789, which set forth the laws of the country. America was supposed to be an egalitarian society in which "all men are created equal", and they passed the Bill of Rights to guarantee a certain set of rights to the people of the country. They passed some amendments to the Constitution to add or take away some rights, and also enacted bills such as the Neutrality Act, Alien-Sedition Act, Volstead Act, and other laws that would be major changes to law.

Background
Before the United States was founded, the country was originally composed of various Native American civilizations that lived in villages across the country. They were one with nature, but in 1607, the first English explorers under John Smith arrived on the eastern seaboard and founded the Colony of Virginia. They set up a capital at Jamestown and built a dockyard at Yorktown, and they expanded their colony against the Powhatan Confederacy in wars that ended with the 1644 defeat of the Powhatan tribe. On 1619, the English settlers of Jamestown were joined by women from back home in the Kingdom of England, and they built cities that grew rapidly. Immigrants from Scandinavia and other parts of Northern Europe arrived in the country with a guarantee from King James I of England that they would be given English rights and some land grants ("headrights") if they chose to settle in the colonies. In 1619, the first African-American slaves arrived in the United States, imported from Africa by the Dutch. Soon, the Middle Passage was packed with ships coming to and from Africa hoping to enslave some Africans and sell them to plantation owners for cheap labor - the American Indians rapidly died out due to disease brought by the colonists, so they could not rely on them for labor. That same year, Virginia set up the House of Burgesses, a lawmaking government that was the first form of American government. In 1620, more settlers arrived in the Northeast and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Colony in an area that came to be known as New England. They fought the Nauset tribe and defeated them, taking over several regions there. In the following decades, expansion occurred until all of the eastern seabord was occupied (except for Spanish Florida to the south). The last colony to be founded was Georgia in 1730. The Thirteen Colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were British colonies until 1776. The northern states were mainly used for trade, building ports that traded with other nations. Factories were built and people worked there to produce goods that could be exported, and goods from all over the world could be imported. The Middle Colonies were mainly farmland, as settlers moved out to Pennsylvania at the Ohio Valley to settle new towns. The colony of Pennsylvania was founded on the idea of religious freedom, with English Catholics arriving first and French Huguenots later arriving. Other states founded on religious freedom were Maryland (founded for Catholics) and Rhode Island (whose capital was "Providence", founded by Roger Williams with the purpose of welcoming people of all faiths into the colony). Finally, the Southern Colonies were mainly plantations. Although South Carolina had a major port at Charleston and Georgia had the port of Savannah, all of the inland towns were plantations, mainly selling sugar, tobacco, coffee, and other American goods.

The colonies were constantly at war with the native tribes on the frontier, pushing them back to over the Appalachian Mountains. Indian raids were constantly a problem, and they eventually allied with the Kingdom of France in the Ohio Valley. From 1701 to 1714, while the War of the Spanish Succession was being fought in Europe, British and Colonial troops fought against French and Indian troops in Canada and on the Frontier in several skirmishes. There were not as many land battles as there were in Europe, but mainly Indian raids. Naval battles took place off the colonies as both sides struggled over the control of trade routes in the country. War raged again from 1740 to 1748 in King George's War and from 1754 to 1763 in the French and Indian War. The French and Indian War was one of the most ferocious wars fought on the American continent. Beginning when George Washington and a small American army clashed with the French under Jumonville in the Ohio Valley in 1754, the war escalated into a conflict spanning from the Ohio Valley in Virginia up into Canada. The colonists and Iroquois Confederacy allies fought against the French, their Huron, Abenaki, Shawnee, Lenape, and other Indian allies on the frontier and in the northern colonies on the Great Lakes, and many battles took place around French and British forts in the Ohio Valley, on the Hudson River Valley, and in the gulf of the St. Lawrence River. In 1758 the British Army got involved in the war for real when Jeffrey Amherst seized Louisbourg from the French in Canada, and the British army moved from Nova Scotia into Canada. They evicted the Acadians from Canada, forcing them to flee into French Louisiana (where they became known as "Cajuns"). The British army under James Wolfe captured Quebec in 1759 in a battle that cost his life and that of his French adversary Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, but the battle was a decisive British victory. Montreal fell in 1760, and the Spanish entry into the war in 1762 did little to help the French side. The British Royal Navy defeated the French at sea multiple times in the North Atlantic, the River Valley, and in the Caribbean, and in 1762 they captured the Spanish Empire city of Havana in Cuba and Manila in the Philippines. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the war, and Britain gained control of all lands east of the Mississippi bar Spanish Florida. Louisiana went to Spain, and Canada became a British possession. France was completely pushed out of North America's mainland and restricted to the island of Martinique in the Caribbean and French Guiana in northern South America.

In the aftermath of the war, King George III of Great Britain decided to tax the colonists for the vast amount of debts that Britain had gathered during the hard-fought war. In 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, taxing American goods indirectly. Americans were angered by this and broke into the mansion of Boston governor Thomas Hutchinson, and in 1770 the Boston Massacre of 7 American thugs that assaulted a British soldier led to public outcry. The British repealed the Stamp Act, but their Tea Act and the Townshend Acts led to more animosity. In 1773, the American "Sons of Liberty" under Samuel Adams dumped loads of tea into Boston Harbor, getting rid of a huge portion of British income. The British responded with the Intolerable Acts, closing Boston Harbor and stationing troops in American houses in the Quartering Act. The Americans responded by forming the Committees of Correspondence, a group of riders that spread propaganda through the colonies while avoiding British troops. They managed to unite many colonies against the British, and several American politicians from all of the colonies formed the Continental Congress, the body of American lawmakers that gathered to discuss the issues. They eventually came to be the leaders of the revolution against the British, and in meeting, they were all committing the crime of treason, which was punishable by death. In 1775, American men in Massachusetts formed a militia of "Minutemen" and stockpiled arms at Concord, prompting General Thomas Gage to send British troops to Concord to destroy the guns. They met the American militia at Lexington, where the first shots of the war were fired. A few Americans were killed in a short battle, while only 1 British soldier was shot in the thigh. The Americans decided to carry out guerrilla warfare in the surrounding area, and they moved the guns from Concord to other locations. As the British marched, they were picked off by Americans at the Old North Bridge and Barrett's Farm, and on the retreat to Boston they suffered heavy losses. 95 Americans and 270 British were killed or wounded in the Battle of Lexington and the Battle of Concord, the first two battles of the war.

The American militia proceeded to lay siege to Boston, which was still under British control. British generals John Burgoyne, William Howe, and Henry Clinton arrived in the country in June 1775, and they led their army in an attack on the American defenses at Breed's Hill (later mistaken as nearby Bunker Hill). The Americans held the British off for several hours before running out of ammunition, and they were forced to retreat. 1/6 of the British officers killed in the war died at Bunker Hill, and 1,000 British troops were killed or wounded. The Americans resumed the siege of Boston as Howe took over Gage's position. Meanwhile, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen (the latter of whom led the "Green Mountain Boys" of Vermont, a group of hard drinkers and thugs who attacked New Yorkers to prevent them from entering their self-declared state of Vermont) attacked Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York and forced all 45 British troops to surrender.

After Bunker Hill and Fort Ticonderoga, the Second Continental Congress convened to appoint a commander of their new armed forces, the Continental Army. They elected General George Washington of Virginia as its commander-in-chief due to his French and Indian War experience, and he took control of an army of poorly-trained rag-tag farmers when he arrived in Boston. Many had little to no experience in warfare, and they were low on morale and ammunition. An American attack on Quebec in December 1775 by Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery, hoping to gain Canadian support for the American Revolution, failed as Arnold was wounded, Montgomery was killed, and the freezing American troops were racked by grapeshot. The Americans withdrew, and 1776 looked like another bad year.

General Washington won his first victory in Boston in early 1776, threatening to bombard the British in the city unless General Howe withdrew his army. The British did withdraw by ship to Halifax, and Boston became the capital of the patriot rebellion. The Americans gained control of all of the northern colonies and became powerful, but some still wanted peace. Disheartened by the defeat at Quebec, the Americans tried to offer peace to King George, saying that Parliament and not King George was to blame for their rebellion and that they wanted a return to a better time. King George flatly refused, and on 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress drafted the Declaration of Independence. On 4 July, Thomas Jefferson signed it. The declaration was also a declaration of war, and the British king sent an army of 23,000 troops to North America to attack New York City, which was the center of all trade in America. Sitting on the Hudson River, it was a city of 20,000 people that was a commercial center, cleaned up since the 1750s. On 10 July, the British Royal Navy bombarded Kip's Bay, Manhattan. General Howe's army moved to Staten Island, and Washington moved to Manhattan. The British landing at Kip's Bay was a horrible defeat for the Americans, who fled despite Washington's attempts to rally them. The British failed initially to land at Throggs Neck in The Bronx, but they later pushed inland and advanced to Brooklyn, where Washington and his army planned to fight them. The British Army was now 36,000-strong, and included not only British troops, but also German mercenaries called "Hessians", fierce bayonet-equipped troops that were purchased from Hessian princes with the help of King George's German wife Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

In August, the Americans and their British and Hessian enemies met in the Battle of Long Island (also called Brooklyn Heights). The American army was outflanked by Howe and defeated, with William Alexander's 2nd Maryland Regiment holding the British and Hessians off as the rest of the army retreated. Only 45 of the regiment survived, and Alexander was wounded and captured. Washington first retreated to Manhattan, and then to New Jersey. The British and Hessians burnt New York City down and proceeded to occupy much of the colonies again.

Washington's army was demoralized by the loss of New York City and withdrew south through New Jersey. Most of the troops' enlistments were supposed to expire on 31 December 1776, so Washington needed a miracle to rally them. He got his chance when he found out that 1,200 Hessians under Johann Rall were encamped at Trenton in New Jersey. Crossing the Delaware River from Pennsylvania into New Jersey, Washington ambushed the Hessians and destroyed their army with only 4 men wounded. Rall was killed, and most of his men were captured. The reason why the victory worked so well was because Rall ignored a spy's letter warning him of the American advance while he was having a party with his troops on Christmas Day, 1776. The letter was found in his pocket even after he was killed.

With this victory, Washington proceeded to defeat the British rearguard nearby in the Battle of Princeton in January 1777. The British general Charles Cornwallis was forced to retreat, and the Hessians in Elizabeth and Hackensack were forced to withdraw. New Jersey was now in Patriot hands, and the Americans succeeded in driving the British and Hessians out. The Americans mainly fought the British in the northern colonies, and in 1777 the British general Burgoyne came up with a plan to defeat the Americans: he would invade New York through Canada, the Mohawk Valley, and New York City. William Howe would seize the American capital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and capture the congress. The plan went well for Howe, who defeated Washington at Brandywine and then Germantown before capturing the capital. Washington was defeated, but in the north, a British and Indian attack on Fort Schuyler (now Fort Stanwix) was repelled after a bloody battle at Oriskany that cost the Americans dearly and American trickery (captured Loyalist Han Yost Schuyler was sent to the Indians, convincing them that they were about to be killed, forcing them to desert the British). Burgoyne's march from Canada was slowed by Daniel Morgan's frontiersmen, who felled trees to block the British roads. They also picked off the Indian scouts that came with the British, and all of them either were killed or deserted. British officers were also targeted by sharpshooters, breaking the rules of war.

The final confrontation in the campaign occurred at Saratoga. An initial battle was inconclusive, but in the second battle, the Americans stormed two British redoubts and killed British general Simon Fraser, who was shot from afar by marksman Timothy Murphy. General Burgoyne surrendered his whole army to General Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, and the battle led France to join the Americans in the war. After the battle, the Americans encamped at Valley Forge in the winter. Conditions were bad, with many troops lacking shoes and food and men suffering from smallpox and dysentery in cold weather. However, French general Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette joined the Continental Army and Prussian general Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben arrived to train the Americans, and he taught them how to become a European-style army. In 1778, they won their first post-Valley Forge victory at the Battle of Monmouth, where they defeated the British as they left Philadelphia. The British retreated to Sandy Hook and from there to New York, where they camped out. 1779 saw few major battles on land, although George Rogers Clark's frontiersmen peacefully secured the British forts of Vincennes and Kaskaskia on the frontier and the Polish-American general Casimir Pulaski was killed in the failed siege of Savannah, a French blunder.

In 1780, the British shifted their focus to the south, with the north in American hands apart from New York. They captured Charleston from the Americans and defeated Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden, but American guerrilla leaders Daniel Morgan, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens attacked several British forts in South Carolina and held the British general Cornwallis from heading up north to meet Henry Clinton in New York City to defeat Washington. The battle of Cowpens utterly defeated the British army, and in 1781 Washington and a French army under Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur (Comte de Rochambeau) snuck past New York and encircled Cornwallis at Yorktown. After the French Navy destroyed the British fleet sent to aid Cornwallis, Cornwallis' defenses fell to an Allied assault and he was forced to surrender. The Siege of Yorktown pretty much ended the war, although fighting resumed in British-held Georgia and the frontier until the end of the war with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Treaty of Paris let America gain full independence, and in 1789 they wrote the constitution.

America elected George Washington as its first President, and he served two yerms, with his term ending in 1797. Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1796, a revolt against the price of whiskey. However, under his tenure the country grew into a modernized state, building the White House as the Presidential home and the center of the US government in the District of Columbia, soon to be known as "Washington, D.C.". In 1797, John Adams became the new president, and the burden of repaying war debts fell to him. In 1789, America's first ally King Louis XVI of France was overthrown in the French Revolution by republicans inspired by the American Revolution, and in 1792 they declared war on Prussia and the Austrian Empire before adding Great Britain, Spain, and the United Provinces to their enemies in 1793 after executing King Louis. The French Republic was hostile to the Americans, as Adams refused to repay the debts; they had been made to the French monarchy, not the republic. When American diplomats in Paris were insulted by French diplomats called "X, Y, and Z" in the "XYZ Affair", American and French ships began to fight in the Atlantic. From 1797 to 1799 the Quasi War was fought, ending after Napoleon Bonaparte seized power. While being upset that America refused to stop trade with Britain, Napoleon generously sold the Louisiana Territory (the US Midwest) to the Americans for only $2,000,000, doubling the size of the USA. The Americans took over the Midwest, which became their new frontier. Native tribes were pushed into the Great Plains, and in 1829 they were re-settled in Oklahoma after walking the Trail of Tears.

In 1812, America and Britain were at odds again. The Indians resisted their relocation and attacked the Americans at Tippecanoe in 1811, which was a victory for American general William Henry Harrison. However, the British supported the raids in their attacks and also "impressed" American sailors at sea, forcing them to serve on British ships. In 1812, America declared war on Britain, starting the War of 1812. US troops invaded British Canada, which was a disaster. They succeeded in defending their toeholds in many battles, and although their navy was grossly outnumbered by the Royal Navy, they hired privateers to attack British ships in the Atlantic Ocean and their small navy won a few victories in the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. In 1814, with the downfall of Napoleon and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the whole British Royal Navy and their British Army were now free to attack America, and they reversed the American attack on Canada. Some besieged Fort McHenry in Baltimore after burning the capital of Washington DC, destroying the White House and forcing President James Madison to flee. However, the Americans held the British back at Fort McHenry and General Robert Ross was picked off. The British were forced to retreat, and in 1815 the British suffered a final defeat in the Battle of New Orleans, which took place a few months after the war ended. The withdrawal of the British proved that America was truly independent in the "Second War of Independence", but apart from Spain's cession of the port of Mobile to the Americans, not much changed. The Americans now fought the Seminoles (mixed Native tribe remnants and escaped slaves) in Florida, which they eventually purchased. They also took over Oregon and lots of the lands to the Northwest, and explored the Indian Territory. American pioneers explored the west after the 1830s, and from 1846 to 1848 they conquered all of Mexico's territory of California (present-day California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas) after they went to war in the Mexican-American War, caused by the American annexation and expansion of the former Republic of Texas. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo left them in control of all of the present-day mainland United States, and they fought the Indians until their resistance ended in 1890 at the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In the 1850s, America underwent several social problems. The issue of slavery became a major one after the Dred Scott Decision, the Bleeding Kansas civil war, the publishing of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and pro- and anti-slavery debates. All states in the South were given the right to own slaves in the Missouri Compromise, and all states in the North abolished slavery. This divide led to the secession of the southern states in 1861 to form the Confederate States of America. Led by Jefferson Davis, the CSA attacked the American fort of Fort Sumter in April 1861 when the garrison of the isolated South Carolina fort refused to surrender. This began the American Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history. The Union in the North defeated the Confederacy in the South after a war that lasted from April 1861 to June 1865, and it saw heavy casualties due to the invention of new repeater rifles, multi-shot pistols, Gatling Guns, and other types of weaponry. The states were reunited through the efforts of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated at the end of the war in 1865. After the war's end, slavery was abolished, but African-American civil rights are still not as equal as white male rights. Women had to also fight for suffrage until the 1920s, when they were finally given the right to vote, although they are still paid less than men.

The aftermath of the Civil War - Reconstruction - saw the election of African-American senators and the establishment of democracy in the states. From 1865 to 1876, the Americans defeated the Sioux, Comanche, Sauk, Arapaho, Hopi, Navajo, and other American Indian tribes on the Great Plains that resisted the American expansion. In 1890, surrendering Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee, and most of them were confined to reservations in Oklahoma and the Dakotas.

Along with peace came industrialization. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, the USA was quick to adapt. They used steam-powered warships in the Civil War and built factories for building guns, although it was in the latter half of the 19th century that they adapted quickly. Factories spewed smoke into the sky as young children worked in factories to produce goods alongside older men. Working conditions were poor along with the pay, and many riots broke out. Workers formed "unions" to advocate their rights in the workplace, and by the 1890s they were getting better safety rules and children were no longer working in factories.

American Imperialism also reached its extent. American naval forces conquered Hawaii without a war and forced the Queen of Hawaii to surrender, letting the Americans take over the islands and transform them into naval bases and also resource-laden lands for the Dole fruit company. Thanks to "Yellow Journalism", the United States also entered a war with Spain in 1898 after USS Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Spanish Cuba while carrying Cuban refugees from the Cuban War of Independence. American forces conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Tinian, the Philippines, and all of Spain's islands in the Pacific Ocean during the conflict, and they began to "civilize" and modernize the islands. In the Philippines, rebels tried to seize independence, but by 1902 the real insurgency ended (although the war ended in 1912). The Philippines were modernized, as were the other possessions of the US. Cuba was given independence from America in exchange for a trade agreement, although Puerto Rico became a US territory, as did Guam and Tinian.

America continued to modernize, and they were at peace from 1902 to 1916. During this time, America was populated in a second wave of immigrants from all over Europe. Millions of people, primarily Russians (mainly Russian Jews), Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Spanish, French, British, and Scandinavians, immigrated to America in search of new lives. They went to Ellis Island in New York, while Pacific Islanders and Asians went to San Francisco in California. New York City became a huge city, with 8,000,000 people from all over the world with countless cultures. They brought with them their languages, cuisine, and culture, making America a melting pot and a land of immigrants. From 1890 to 1930, America's population skyrocketed.

However, America's peace would soon come to an end with the start of upheaval in Europe. In 1914, the United States was pressured by their allies of the United Kingdom and France to join World War I as the German Empire and Austria-Hungary overran Belgium and northern France on the Western Front, northern Italy, Greece, Serbia, and Romania on the Southern Front, the Ottoman Empire waged war against the British in Egypt in the Middle East, and the Austrians and Germans overran Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus after defeating the Russian Empire on the Eastern Front. President Woodrow Wilson refused to enter the war until 1916, when the cruise ship Lusitania was sunk by German U-boats for carrying small arms to Britain. Many Americans died, and Wilson was incensed. Also in 1916, Mexican bandit Pancho Villa raided Colombus in New Mexico, killing a few Americans. In 1917, the British intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram, which was a letter from Germany to Mexico telling them that if the USA ever joined World War I on the Allied side and Mexico chose to ally with Germany, Mexico could reclaim all of the lands it lost in the Mexican-American War of 1848. Wilson declared war on Germany and sent the American Expeditionary Force under John J. Pershing to France, Belgium, and Italy, defeating the Germans and Austro-Hungarians by 11 November 1918, when the armistice was signed. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles ended Austria-Hungary, which divided into Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The German Empire became the unstable and corrupt Weimar Republic, and from 1919 to 1923 Germany was rocked by political assassinations, putsches in major cities, and street battles between socialist/communist rebels supporting the Soviet Union's ideals, Freikorps right-wing paramilitaries, and Weimar Army loyalists. The Russian Empire became the communist Soviet Union, which killed all political enemies in the country and destroyed opposition to their dictatorship rule in the Russian Civil War. Former Russian territories Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan gained independence briefly, and all but Poland and the Baltic States were reconquered by 1923. The United States played a small role in the follow-up wars in Europe apart from sending a few troops to fight the Soviets in the civil war.

The Americans fought a few "Banana Wars" in Central America and the Caribbean at the time, hoping to take advantage of weakness in some new countries in order to help the United Fruit Company gain influence. They invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, although in all three they eventually left peacefully. In 1929, their stock market crashed in "Black Friday", starting the Great Depression in which millions were left without jobs. President Herbert Hoover could do little, but in 1933 newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal saved the country. The people recovered from the crash, and Roosevelt became an inspiring leader. He allied with strong personalities like Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom and Chiang Kai-shek of China, and in the 1930s he supported the Republic of China when they were invaded by the aggressive Japanese Empire.

However, the American people were not willing to go into a war yet. In 1939, Nazi Germany's Chancellor Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, overrunning the country in one month using Blitzkrieg tactics and an alliance with the USSR dictator Joseph Stalin. Hitler did the same with Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and France in 1940 and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, while he set up puppet governments in southern France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia. The US kept out of the war while arming the Allies with some volunteer pilots, but on 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in revenge for their crippling oil embargo on Japan as a result of Japan's war on China. The US was also declared war on by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, so the US entered the war on the Allied side. They lost almost all of their Pacific possessions to Japan in 1941, although from 1942 onwards they reclaimed their islands in island-hopping campaigns with help from Australia. The US Navy defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy time and time again, and they helped to bombard Japanese strongholds. In Europe, they sent troops to help with the invasion of North Africa in 1942, the invasion of Italy in 1943, and the liberation of Western Europe in 1944. America's participation in D-Day is legendary, with a large cemetery remaining in Normandy, France. American general George S. Patton was the most-successful general of the war, leading the Allies to a quick victory over Germany by the end of the war in May 1945. In August 1945, Japan was forced to surrender after dreadful firebomb and nuclear bomb attacks on their cities, and World War II ended.

The United States gained control of many Japanese islands in the Pacific Ocean, and they restored all of the Japanese conquests to independence. The USA fixed its economy by putting all of its men to war and all of its women to work in factories, and the economy was great. After the war, the Baby Boom era began as US soldiers returned home to their wives. Families had several kids at the same time in often-planned moments, and the population boomed.

However, America fought a new kind of war after the end of World War II. The Soviet Union and the British, French, and American troops divided Europe in half through zones of occupation through Berlin and Vienna. All of the western halfs of the cities and the western half of Europe was free and capitalist, while all of the eastern halfs of the cities and Eastern Europe was communist and puppets of the USSR. The "Cold War" divided Europe as the East and West fought proxy wars across the globe in attempts to overthrow or protect democracies and replace them or fight with dictators loyal to them. The United States and the USSR were at the forefront, and America sent troops to South Korea in 1950-1953 to fight in the Korean War against North Korea and the People's Republic of China with aid from a United Nations coalition. In 1964, they also sent troops to South Vietnam to defend the democracy there against the communist North Vietnam, which divided in half following the granting of independence to French Indochina. From 1964 to 1973, US troops fought in the Vietnam War, a very unpopular and bloody war fought in the jungles in elephant grass. American males from 18 to 25 were drafted into the army to fight against the communists, who would ambush the Americans in the jungles at night. Every day, a few couple American soldiers were killed or wounded in routine search-and-destroy missions against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their Viet Cong communist rebel allies. In 1972, after the Kent State Massacre, public opinion collapsed and in 1973 the US withdrew after the Paris Peace Accords. Vietnam was the first time that the USA lost a war.

Vietnam's aftermath caused the American people to focus more on themselves. In 1973, America's support for the Jewish homeland of Israel against its anti-Semitic Arab neighbors led to an OPEC oil embargo against the US, leaving many without gas or heating. Summers were very hot and winters were freezing, and the American people did not trust the government. The 1980s was called "the ME decade", as people focused on themselves. The US briefly invaded Grenada in 1983, bombed Libya in 1986, and invaded Panama in 1989, but did not take part in any real wars. However, they had new worries. In 1979, the Shah of Iran, a traditional US ally, fled to the US for medical treatment as the Iranian Revolution overthrew the monarchy back home. Ayatollah Khomeini, an Islamic revivalist, took over the country and seized hostages in the US embassy after the USA refused to return the Shah. Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 was a disaster, and the hostages were eventually released only through the US giving guns to Iran. In 1983, the marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon was blown up by Islamic terrorists opposed to the US attempts to create peace amidst the Lebanese Civil War. In 1986, a Libyan agent blew up a nightclub in Berlin filled with US troops, killing many of them. In 1988, the Libyans bombed Pan Am Flight 201 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as revenge for the US bombing of Libya in 1986 in response to the bombing of Berlin. Finally, in 1989 Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Islamist to whom the US had given lots of money and weapons to fight the USSR in the Soviet-Afghan War with, founded the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. Its goal was to destroy Israel and other enemies of Islam, which meant all non-Islamic states and Islamic states that had Western influence (meaning that they had western education, did not implement strict religious law, and followed modernization). al-Qaeda declared war on the US after the US assisted Kuwait against Iraq's invasion in the 1991 Gulf War, as Kuwait refused al-Qaeda's offer of assistance in fighting off Iraqis. In 1998, the al-Qaeda group bombed two US embassies in East Africa, killing many Tanzanians, Kenyans, and US embassy workers in their first major attack. President Bill Clinton had the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan bombed when the President of Sudan offered to tell him where Osama Bin Laden was, leading him to believe that he was in Sudan. However, the factory made medicine and not bombs, and 30,000 people depending on the medicine made there died. Osama led the 2000 USS Cole bombing as well, and al-Qaeda's most audacious attack was on the World Trade Center in 2001, in which 2,973 international civilians were killed when al-Qaeda hijacked four planes and crashed two into the Twin Towers of the WTC (making them collapse after the crash), one into the Pentagon, and one was crashed into a field after a fight with passengers forced the plane down. The US was committed to fighting against terrorism, as it invaded Somalia in 1993 to restore order to the country during the Somali Civil War and also bombed Serbia when they carried out a terroristic genocide against Bosnians during the Bosnian War and Kosovo War.

But after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States had changed. The people rallied behind the government to fight terrorism and keep themselves safe, and the government reassured them of their fears by taking over Afghanistan (a hotbed for al-Qaeda ruled by their Taliban allies) in 2001 and Iraq (a country in which al-Qaeda was based since 1999) in 2003. Iraq eventually had the same result as Vietnam, with the loss of US troops fighting against an uncountable amount of enemy forces leading to a fall in public opinion. The US Army left Iraq in 2011 after eight years of fighting, and Iraq returned to chaos soon after. Afghanistan had a similar situation, and on 27 December 2014 the Americans left the country with the ISAF after fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda for years. In 2011, they killed Osama and conducted various drone missile strikes against terrorists since 2003, killing many al-Qaeda and other terrorist operatives. The fight on terror was waged mainly by drones afterwards, with drone strikes primarily targeting Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, where al-Qaeda was strong.

As the US left Afghanistan in 2014, a new problem emerged in Iraq and Syria. A group calling itself "the Islamic State" took power in large parts of Syria and Iraq, and they took over most of northern Iraq and northern Syria. In Iraq, 98% of their army were Sunni militias opposed to the American installation of Shi'ite Kurds as the rulers of the country. They took over most of the country as the cowardly Iraqi Army fled, and in Syria, they fought against the Syrian Arab Army (government forces) and the Free Syrian Army (moderate Islamist forces) in the Syrian Civil War. They killed Shi'ites, Kurds, and Yazidis at every chance, not to mention their routine destruction of Christian churches. Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself the Caliph of Islam, and rallied 100,000 fighters from across the world to join him in his fight. The US launched Operation Inherent Resolve with their allies to fight IS after they released a series of videos showing the beheadings of captured international journalists, and they armed moderate Islamist fighters to fight not only IS, but also the al-Qaeda offshoot Al-Nusra Front and the Khorasan Group as well as the Ahrar ash-Sham Syrian rebels. They conducted many drone strikes, hoping to prevent many terrorist attacks from taking place. However, 2014 saw many terrorist attacks. Crazed Muslim convert Alton P. Nolen beheaded a woman at a Vaughn Foods supermarket in Oklahoma, a Libyan-Canadian man named Michael Zehaf Bibeau killed a Canadian soldier at the War Memorial in Ottawa before attacking parliament, an Iranian imam held many hostages in Sydney, Australia and killed 2 of them before being killed himself, and on 7 January 2015 three al-Qaeda in Yemen members from Algerian descent in France killed 12 people in the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The terror attacks encouraged the West to fight against terrorism in the Middle East, and the US currently engages in a restless War on Terror.